Martin Eder: The Pale Dance

Isabelle Azoulay Prestel

Martin Eder has an interesting place in the art world. Using watercolour as his medium, something often associated with sweeping landscapes, Eder is something of a maverick. His images are everything that you’d expect a watercolour not to be. In this collection (224 pages), Eder’s bizarre images intersect somewhere between fantasy and reality.

From one page to the next, there are images of naked women, creating an unusual and precarious mood, but this is crossed with images of enlarged kittens. What is Eder trying to say? The narrative that unfolds within each image and between the images captures a certain emotion, one of excitement, but also vulnerability.

Having had a show at Hauser & Wirth in London last year, Eder’s work is greeted with both pleasure and curiosity. One thing is for sure, its multilayered nature invites more questions than it answers. The collection is a great example of Eder’s work, and with an opening text by Isabelle Azoulay, it exposes the work and serves as a starting point for debate around this artist’s oeuvre.